jdreyer wrote on Jan 10, 2013, 15:45:You keep mentioning these studies. Could you provide links?

Unfortunately no, because the studies I'm referring to I didn't read online, but during work. I work for an energy company engaged in fracking (Yes yes, I'm biased, blablabla), so I've read a LOT of documentation about it, including the studies I am referring. I'm sure they are online somewhere, but I don't have immediate access to links.

In any case, the movie "Gasland" really brought it all about, and it's basically full of panic-rhetoric. The whole "it sets your faucets on fire!" bullshit was debunked by the ACTUAL WATER COMPANY IN QUESTION who stated that normal methane buildup was the cause for that single, isolated incident. Yet everyone worried about fracking always immediately bleats "AW MY GAWSH IT SAWTS AWR HAWSES AWN FAWR!"

It's much like Michael Moore's bullshit. Take one small thing people are scared of, then build up this entire fan fiction around it, and plenty of people will believe it. In essence it's no different than what Fox News does, which everyone always lambasts them for. But hey, if we do it in the name of the environment, then apparently it's fine?

"Everything is dirty" isn't an a good defense, since there are different levels of dirty.

Right now, everyone is anti-nuke, but coal kills more people per year than nuclear ever did(although nuclear does have the POTENTIAL of killing thousands of people its just that catastrophic failures are rare).

I've never had a problem with nuclear powerplants. It's a simple fact of life that there are 400 million people in the US, and if we want to give them all power, we're going to need nuclear power to be able to do so. Half of Europe runs on Nuclear.

Of course, after Japan last year, it's pretty damn hard to convince anyone to greenlight a nuke reactor anymore...

Wind isn't included in the list, but certainly wind has many times fewer deaths as a power source than coal, no (how DOES wind power kill people prematurely?

Construction and maintenance accidents. They've very few, but every man who plummets to his death from a wind tower is obviously a pretty tragic event. I also think that the transport of the wind tower sections across the nation's highways has likely caused some major accidents (as those are some stupidly big trucks they haul them in. I see them pass about once a week when I go to work. That thing can't brake very well...)

3. The benefits are strong: natural gas is a much cleaner and more efficient fuel source for electrical production vs. coal, so there's an argument for switching to it short term to meet electrical needs while preventing pollution and global warming until even cleaner sources come online.

This is really the big one. Investing in green energy is fine, but it will take 20-30 years before enough production is online to meet the majority of demand. Such investment would also tally somewhere around a trillion dollars, which isn't money the US has lying around somewhere.

So barring that, you can either have Coal, Oil or Nuclear as your alternative power source. Nobody will engage in Nuclear right now, we want to get rid of our Oil dependence, so that leaves coal. And for everyone who complains how dirty a fracking site is, have you SEEN what a coal mine does to the environment around it?

(And the eco hippies will reply by saying "yeah, but a coal mine brings local jobs!" What do you think a fracking site brings?)

Economically, taking advantage of the US' natural gas reserves has the power to take the US out of its slump and likely even out of its debt, there is that much money involved in it. I'm not saying that money takes precedence over environmental concerns, but until such environmental concerns have actually been scientifically proven, I'm going to say that fracking is about the best thing we can do to keep our energy supply up to par.